angry tapir writes: "A group of Microsoft Researchers believe that the current model of cloud computing, where a tenant purchases computing resources, could be replaced with a "job-based" model. The idea is that instead of deciding what resources they want, customers could specify a job and completion time, adding an extra layer of abstraction to the cloud model. The benefits include making life easier for cloud customers and letting cloud providers more efficiently allocate resources. In their simulations using test MapReduce jobs the provider was able to accept 3-14% more requests because of efficiency gains, as well as more resource-intensive requests, increasing the data centre's goodput by 7-87%."